Violence on people with intellectual disabilities

This article examines violence on people with intellectual disabilities. Since this problematic issue is almost unknown in Croatian literature circles, the article's introduction gives us an insight into foreign research that deals with various forms of violence towards people with intellectual disabilities as well as lawful entries of violence towards the latter. The goal of this paper was to determine the level of violence targeted towards people with intellectual disabilities, what type of violence they experience the most and who are the most frequent perpetrators of such violence. The research was conducted via a semi-structured questionnaire made especially for this investigation; a total of 59 people were interviewed throughout Zagreb and the Medimurje region. The results showed that mental violence was most frequent, physical violence over people with intellectual disabilities followed, whilst there were no victims of sexual violence. The most frequent perpetrators were friends and parents. One third of the examinees had never discussed the violence. The characteristics of the respective examinees were quite different when considering factors such as age and level of disability. These findings follow the already existing research of violence on people with intellectual disabilities with limitations connected to the appropriate sample, and they refer to a more systematic dealing of this problem.